Case Study: Riskified overcomes Postgres single-writer bottleneck to reach 10,000+ TPS and zero-downtime migration with Cockroach Labs' CockroachDB

How Riskified Mitigated a Postgres Bottleneck with CockroachDB

Riskified, an eCommerce fraud‑prevention platform operating in 185 countries and reviewing over $105B GMV in 2022, faced a transaction bottleneck caused by PostgreSQL’s single‑writer limitation that threatened its ability to scale its chargeback‑guaranteed application. To overcome this constraint, Riskified evaluated modern databases and selected Cockroach Labs’ CockroachDB for its Postgres compatibility, elasticity, and resilience.

Cockroach Labs helped Riskified migrate via a zero‑downtime approach using AWS DMS, CockroachDB Replicator, and CockroachDB’s Change Data Capture (replacing Debezium), plus professional‑services scripts and tooling like MOLT Fetch. Today Riskified self‑hosts CockroachDB on AWS autoscaling groups across AZs, eliminating the single‑writer bottleneck, delivering elastic scaling and AZ resilience, and supporting over 10,000 online transactions per second.

Riskified

Harel Safra

Data Platform Engineering Team Lead